The Thousand Days

Timeframe: 1916-1919.
Belligerents: Great Russia vs. Sweden, Saxony, Pomerania, etc.
Outcome: Swedish strategic defeat; nominal Vechist victory

At some point, after the Russian Civil War was over but before 1920, the Vechist government in Tver had a problem. Specifically, it was a problem with Sweden, or maybe Finland, or maybe Karelia. (I will be the first to confess that I'm not sure exactly how Scandinavian politics plays out in Andalusada, even after the Great Realignment.)

The Vechist government has enough of a problem, in fact, that it authorizes one of its generals to teach the King of Sweden a lesson. That lesson (as I said once) is remembered in Sweden as "the Three Years' War." Everywhere else in the world, it's remembered for the authoritative history written about it: The Thousand Days.

By the time it's done, Sweden has been reduced to starvation and poverty, which ten years later it still hasn't recovered from. This is the story of that reduction.

An outline of the Thousand Days

This section is a stub. It will be expanded upon.

This outline is, as ever, extremely tentative; I'm not clear on the details of how it played out yet, simply because so much of it depends on the world of the 20th century, which I also don't know too much about. But what I know for relatively certain is this:

• The Battle of Visby. The siege of Visby is a grueling one, not least because the initial Russian bombardment doesn't soften up the Swedes nearly as much as they'd hoped. In particular, the first landing on Visby is repulsed at great cost, forcing the Russians to launch it again; it's a very dear victory to them.
  
  With the fall of Visby, Sweden's navy is reduced to littoral warfare. It's at this point that Saxony is forced to field its own Baltic fleet (not a terribly big one either), which does manage to check the Russian blue-water navy.
• The Ume River Campaign. Part of what makes the Battle of Visby so grueling was that the Russians had to split their naval forces; reducing Visby wasn't the only thing on their plate. At the same time, the Russians established a beachhead in Holmsund, letting them establish supply and transport lines both around and across the Gulf of Bothnia. (Securing the other ends of those lines, in Finland and Karelia, was probably the single biggest Russian hangup during the latter half of the Thousand Days.)
• The Battle of Stockholm. Visby was probably the most lethal battle of the Thousand Days in terms of percentages of casualties; but the most infamous battle of the Thousand Days is by far the Battle of Stockholm, which sees a lot of civilians caught in the crossfire. This is the battle that gives the world its most famous taste of industrialized war. This is the battle that coins the term "Stockholm Syndrome."
• The Ostrobothnian campaign: The biggest weakness of the Russian army is its supply lines, which have to cross the Gulf of Bothnia. Sweden's allies try to cut those supply lines by hitting their far side. Operationally it's a disaster.
• The Russian withdrawal: Strategically, though, that attempt costs just enough men and just enough time to delay just enough operations to prevent the Russians from consolidating their advance - just when the Black Sea fronts start having trouble as well. The War Government concludes that the operational objectives in Sweden have been achieved (and, privately, that the front has been grossly overextended), and orders the army groups to withdraw.

There is, of course, more to it than this; but that's enough for the moment.

Consequences of the Thousand Days

Russia's strategic goals in Scandinavia weren't completely achieved, but the operational one (a punitive strike against Sweden) was achieved all too well.

• By war's end, every eighth Swede on the planet is dead, wounded, missing or a prisoner of war. I wouldn't be surprised if about as many have been displaced, too. This was enormous.
• Not all of the displacement is external; there's a lot of internally displaced Swedes too. Dalarna in particular saw lots of refugees scattered across it, in obscure out-of-the-way places like Orsa.
• Oddly, West Bothnia (which didn't have enough people to be devastated) has become much more important; it was a strategic liability, and the Russian armies had to develop the area a bit before they left.
• The Vechist armies were obviously impressed with Swedish engineering, because they stole so much of it: entire factories were dismantled down to the foundations and shipped east. At war's end, a lot of Sweden's economy has nothing to restart with.
• Because the fighting reached as far south as Scania, Sweden was also forced to import a lot of food during the Thousand Days - and afterwards too. As of 1930, parents tell their kids to eat their spinach, because there are people starving in Sweden.

There are larger strategic issues, too:

• Crippling Sweden's navy has left Saxony as foremost of the Baltic navies. It was still hugely costly in terms of resources, but without the KuK navy intervention is the reason the Russians don't have the run of Scandinavia now; that's a lot of political capital and good PR, and they're using it to their advantage in forming the Wehrverein.
• Recognizable industrial warfare first blossomed in the Thousand Days. Neither side had the resources to really bring their inventions to fruition, but the seeds were sown. When people think about what wars in the future will be like, they base their forecasts on the Thousand Days.
• Littoral warfare was really important. Militaries being always prepared to fight the last war, this is going to skew R&D towards amphibious capability and such.

And some other considerations as well:

• The Thousand Days were the first high-visibility demonstration of Vechist military prowess. While it'd been fighting for more than a decade by this point, most of that fighting was off the radar - war reporters in the Russian theater were generally reporting on the Civil War from a Tsarist perspective. (Language barriers compounded this; as of 1930, a lot of what's commonly known about the Caucasian front at the time is bogus and based purely on hearsay.) The Russo-Swedish war broke that paradigm for good.